I RTFA but it didn't really go into details on why this particular deal is so bad other than some generalities: the leave group says it doesn't leave enough and the stay group says it leaves too much.
Can anyone shed a bit more light on what's going on here?
Full EU membership rides on four freedoms: Free movement of people, capital, goods and services. A full EU member gets a say in EU lawmaking, and in order to facilitate the freedoms, EU standards and legislation have to be in place so that quality of say goods meets a common standard. As a full member you can't pick and choose which of the freedoms you want.
The UK was a full EU member but we kept our own currency. We also had a veto allowing us to torpedo just about any proposal we didn't like. Pretty freaking sweet deal.
However, the UK has never taken EU politics seriously. EU politics almost never reach UK mainstream media except for right-wing idiots to complain about rules regarding bendy bananas and act like we have no say when in fact ring wingers prefer to complain about the EU rather than participate in it and forge relationships in the EU that benefit us and the EU as a whole. The only times when the UK would try to negotiate with the EU was to demand more privileges and our proposals would get shot down every time.
IMO the UK has suffered from 'British empire' thinking way past its sell-by date: If there's a notion of getting something for nothing, the UK loves it.
So after 30 years of the right wing media sources telling us that the EU wants to steal our babies and replace them with horrid foreign ones, the previous PM (in a desperate gambit to win the 2015 election) promised a referendum on EU membership, then on winning the election proceeded to run an utterly unspirited 'remain' campaign with lots of vague allusions that we'll be sorry to leave ladedadeda, meanwhile the leave campaign continued the rhetoric of the last 30 years along with the positive-sounding "take back our country" message and got a very narrow majority of the electorate.
The argument for 'Leave' was basically along the lines of that we have no say in EU politics (which was incorrect), that even more horrid foreigners will be allowed into the EU (FUD), and we need to "take back control of our borders" despite the fact that we could choose to control our borders more if we wanted to, but the fact remains that big businesses love to have cheaper employment that comes from immigration.
So the current deal basically says we will have no say over EU rules but we have to abide by them in order to trade with the EU. Yes, no more horrid EU foreigners coming in willy-nilly, but frankly most of them are white (or near enough not to matter), and the horrid foreigners that 9/10 Brexiteers complain about are not white and not from the EU so logically nothing changes as a result of us leaving the EU for them.
Also, the current deal deprives us of our 'financial passport' which has to do with the UK financial industry and freely trading in Europe that makes up about 20% of our economy, so we're throwing them under the bus as well.
The reason why there are so few deals on the table for us is the Northern Ireland border. N.I and Ireland share a land border and as a result of the Good Friday Agreement (to stop the hostilities between north and south), that has to stop being a border of any real importance. N.I is part of the UK so in leaving the EU we either have to jettison N.I from the UK (and since the conservatives paid £2bn to a Northern Ireland political party in exchange for propping up the minority conservative government here, that's not really an option if they want to get this deal through UK parliament), or we have to have a relationship with the EU which is compatible with a soft border between N.I and Ireland.
Of course, the N.I border was mentioned during the referendum campaign, but as a footnote and the Brexiteers told the electorate that they had had enough of experts so stop listening to pretty much all the economists telling the public that Brexit is an insanely bad idea, and that any other criticisms are nothing more than the FUD being circulated by the Dark Lord and his nefarious plan called "Project Fear".
It is utter insanity. I had been hoping against all reason that the conservative government was going to go through a massive song-and-dance to then conclude that Brexit is an insanely bad idea and constitutes a loss on pretty much every front, but seemingly May (who was a very quiet Remainer btw) is announcing full steam ahead despite everything. My only hopes now are one or both of these possibilities:
1 - Parliament grows a spine and tells the government to get fucked.
2 - Lacking a mandate (and/or feeling cold feet), the government resorts to another referendum.
I'm sceptical about Parliament because the Labour/opposition party is hopelessly divided by Jeremy Corbyn being pro Brexit and his party being mostly anti Brexit, the Scottish National Party are often abstaining from votes that aren't strictly about Scotland, and the conservatives are still kowtowing to wingnuts like the Christian fundamentalist Jacob Rees-Mogg (who is against abortion for any reason) and the British version of Donald Trump-lite being Boris Johnson.
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